Domain II: Creating a Positive, Productive Classroom Environment

Artifact 1:
This is a project I created for my Elementary Instructional Methods and Management course at St. Edward’s. It is a behavior management plan for my future classroom that focuses on how I plan to motivate my students to learn through my teaching and discipline strategies as well as the environment I will foster. This project is located on a website I have created that I plan to use to share future experiences as a classroom teacher.
Behavior Management Plan

Artifact 2:
The following are pictures of different posters, anchor charts, and bulletin boards I have created and assembled during my time as a student teacher in a fourth grade classroom. While I don’t believe the most important thing about teaching is bulletin boards and posters, I do think having a visually pleasing classroom can make a positive impact on the classroom environment and visual cues can help scaffold learning.

 

This is a Classroom Jobs poster. Students rotate through different jobs in the classroom. Any students that do not have a job for the week are “on vacation.”

 

 

 

 

This is a poster about myself that my cooperating teacher allowed me to display next to my desk. I made sure to include tidbits about myself that I thought the students would find interesting or be able to relate to.

 

 

 

 

This is an anchor chart I created while having a whole class discussion about how good readers think while they are reading. I allowed students to give me the ideas I included to keep it student centered.

 

 

 

 

This is a bulletin board that’s displayed above the classroom library. I have been adding mini anchor charts about each genre we study to a “Genre Study” section. This way, students can refer back to them when deciding what genre a certain text is.

 

These are posters of book covers students decorated. They were told to include one book they loved when they were little, one book a friend has recommended to them, and one book a family member is reading at home. This activity was to connect literature at home to literature in school.

 

I created this anchor chart as I introduced leads, or hooks, in stories. I first read examples of different types of leads in books from the classroom library and had students tell me what they noticed about them that made them interesting.
This is a writing bulletin board I compiled that students can refer to throughout the writing process. There are anchor charts to use when revising and editing, icons to remind students how to make their stories interesting, and a diagram of the writing process that includes pictures of a personal narrative that I wrote and took through the entire writing process as a modeled during our first writing unit.